All nouns wear masks, the adjective lives underneath: moody, violent, sycophant, loud-mouthed, couth. O what nouns get done to them! While only another noun can move a mountain – “remover”, say, or “miracle” – you can only climb it with a verb – or lose your breath. But French nouns are much more social, perhaps fearful; they don’t go out alone, they hold on to a brother or sister, a Ia or le, by their little hand (in Yiddish, hentele.) Hold on as faithfully as q to u, as I to (obs.) thee – a dearer you – with as few other liaisons.

Where the single-gendered, patient adjective never throws a tantrum in English, it’ll give you trouble in French, if you don’t seat the forest, never an it, but a she and her sylvan attributes, near her own sex:, or don’t put masculine fire near masculine tree. Against their better judgment and safety rules, they must agree.

The most redoubtable nouns, however, live in German, robed in Capitals and Crises, prepared for the best and worst, so that Chair is as dramatic as Throne or Wart and a Wristwatch or Clock, a Tongue or Cake strike equal Beats and Terror to the Heart; demand equal Protocol and Respect.

Punctuation’s tough on those who doubt: a period comes to them like an execution.

They need more room for the contingent – like James or Proust – for the hesitant, uncertain. And tough on epistolary anarchists: it creeps behind their enemy lines of exclamation points, bringing law !!! and ORDER !!!! commas,,,,colons:::: merciless when it underlines words in an otherwise unarmed sentence for emphasis, putting its iron bars on a window # or a lawn to warn off those who doubt our sincerity and purpose.

Whereas parentheses are half-drawn ) ( curtains like suspicion.

And what a relief to spot the wings of quotation marks, an utterance at last, a “conversation” breaking up a page, like warblers " " " " in a desert of description.

Nonetheless, great thoughts can bear full sunlight, full stops, question marks. They can stomp or glide into a page with punctuation stumbling in their train or even thrown out the window. Yet like everything else, no matter how pure their origins, their progeny’s uncertain.

The astonishing truth about grammar is that the underlying premise is both mystic and existential: its usage proves, linguistically, one cannot speak alone. One refers to the world as it yet addresses it, or God, in the more intimate and consequentialyou, thus assuming there is a who, an I. An assumption that’s common, but, some think, controversial.

As is gender, now an affair of state. Where once the two used to cohabitate they keep two apartments, sometimes meet. But it’s on he + she hangs the tale of conjugate humanity.

ANNE ATIK is the author of three books of poetry, Words in Hock (1974), Offshore (1991) and In and Out of Season (forthcoming); Drancy, a special edition with the painter Kitaj (1989); and How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (2001). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Literary Imagination, Pequod, New World Writing, The Nation, London Jewish Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, and Fulcrum, among others. She has translated Aimé Césaire, Raymond Queneau, Apollinaire, Jules Supervielle, Gérard d’Houville and others. From the Hebrew, she has translated the poems of T. Carmi. With her husband, the late painter Avigdor Arikha, she has been the subject of articles in The New York Times, The Guardian, and other newspapers. She lives in Paris.